Tecmo's Ninja Gaiden (1988 in Japan as Ninja Ryukenden, 1989 here) did something almost no NES game did: it told its story in cutscenes between stages. Tecmo called it the cinema display system, and it amounts to twenty-odd minutes of camera angles, cuts and dialogue built out of the same sprite hardware as the game. Ryu Hayabusa's revenge plot unfolded like a film, and in 1989 that was jaw-dropping. Worth noting the arcade Ninja Gaiden released the same year is a completely different game, a side-scrolling brawler with none of this.

The action holds up. Ryu runs fast, clings to walls and climbs them, and his sword has almost no startup, so the game can throw dense enemy patterns at you and still be fair on paper. The Art of the Fire Wheel and the windmill shuriken run off a shared spirit meter, which turns your sub-weapon into a resource rather than a second attack button.

What makes it brutal is the interaction of three rules. Enemies respawn the moment their spawn point scrolls back onto the screen, so backing up to line up a jump repopulates the ledge you just cleared. Knockback is preserved in midair, so a bird clipping you at the top of a jump sends you into the pit rather than onto the platform. And the final act sends you back to the start of stage 6-1 on a game over, no matter how deep into the last boss you got.

Those three things separately are normal. Together they produce the famous bird-into-pit death that has ended more runs than every boss combined.

Equal parts awe and controller-throwing fury. The cutscenes pulled you in; the difficulty made finishing it an accomplishment.